> My guess is that Apple wants an expensive chip and nobody wants to deliver it.

This sentence makes no sense: Intel (and AMD) sell very expensive chips if you ask them to take your money.

Look, for example, at the prices listed at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Just to list some arbitrary expensive examples from this list:

  AMD EPYC 7702: $6,200.00
  AMD EPYC 7742: $7,416.51
  Intel Xeon W-3275M: $7,453.00
  Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 @ 2.70GHz: $5,890.00
  Intel Xeon W-3265 @ 2.70GHz: $4,551.37
  Intel Xeon Platinum 8268 @ 2.90GHz: $6,005.98

They sell expensive power hungry chips. For servers.

But who wants an expensive low power chip? Only those who make phones. aka Samsung and Apple.

Asking for low-power chips is something different than asking for expensive chips.

Not necessarily. Memory == die size == cost.

The fact that our low-power chips also happen to be lower die size is an artifact of path dependence. The primary market for lower power was battery powered devices of which phones are by far the most numerous. So, the lower power chips started there and didn't have much to do. As those have gained sophistication with time, they have also grown in die size.

Xeon and server chips generally want to maximize memory bandwidth--and they make a whole series of architectural tradeoffs to accommodate that.

Phone chips generally want to maximize power efficiency and basically don't care about memory bandwidth at all. They effectively don't want to turn on the system memory or flash, period, if they can avoid it. One way to do that is to cache things completely in local on-chip RAM.

Computer architects will make completely different tradeoffs for the two domains.